Despite a large variety of web-based messaging solutions (for instance, electronic mail messages, instant messages and so on), faxes or telefaxes (in the following referred to as fax messages) still enjoy continuing support in business. This is because electronic signatures on documents, for instance on contracts, are not yet recognized by law in some countries, while signatures on fax documents are recognized as authentic signatures. Moreover, in some countries faxes are recognized as means of evidence, while e-mails or other electronic messages are not.
A fax message is a telephonic transmission of a scanned printed material (both text and images) to a telephone number connected to a printer or other output device. The original document to be faxed is scanned with a fax machine, which processes the contents (i.e. text or images) as a single fixed graphic image, converting it into a bit map, and then transmitting it to the telephone network in the form of audio-frequency tones. The receiving fax machine interprets the tones and reconstructs the image by printing a paper copy.
Freestanding fax machines working in the above-described manner are more and more replaced by fax servers and other computerized systems capable of communicating (i.e., transmitting and/or receiving) faxes electronically. A fax server is a system installed in a local area network server computer (abbreviated LAN server computer) and configured to provide, according to the client/server model, fax communication (i.e., fax transmission and reception) for one or more computer devices (clients) being attached to the LAN. The fax server may be realized as a separate fax server computer device or as part of a general messaging server computer. Independent of the concrete implementation, the fax server comprises appropriate fax server software for processing the faxes and a fax communication device for communicating the fax messages. The fax communication device can be implemented in the form of one or more dedicated fax boards, fax-capable modems or as software modem emulators using T.38. Such systems have the advantage of reducing costs by eliminating unnecessary print-out and reducing the number of inbound analogue phone lines needed by an office. However, also fax servers are expensive with regard to set-up, maintenance and repair. Moreover, depending on the performance of the fax server, there may exist peak times in which the fax capacity of the server is not sufficient and the fax server is heavily overloaded, whereas for the remaining time the provided fax capacity is not fully used.
In order to provide a more flexible and economic fax messaging solution which better meets the specific demands of customers, remotely hosted fax services (also called cloud fax services) provided by at least one remotely arranged computer device (in the following referred to as cloud fax provider) are nowadays available. Fax services provided by cloud fax providers may comprise Fax-to-Mail services, Mail-to-Fax services and/or web-interface based fax services which enable users to transmit and receive fax messages from their computer devices. Independent of the concrete fax service implementation, the communication between the user computer devices and the cloud fax provider can be simply carried out over the internet, i.e. by using a TCP/IP connection using conventional hardware interfaces. Since the use of cloud fax services makes the use of additional fax software, additional fax hardware, additional phone lines superfluous, the costs for the users can be further reduced. Moreover, in contrast to local fax server solutions, fax messages can be sent or retrieved from anywhere at any time making faxing more convenient.
Due to the above-mentioned advantages of cloud fax services it is expected that local fax server solutions will gradually be replaced by cloud fax services. However, a migration of established fax services from local fax servers to cloud fax providers is time-consuming, and associated with costs and risks because existing fax services cannot easily be migrated to a cloud provider. Moreover, there may be situations in which a local fax service solution is still desirable. However, a mixed operation or a soft migration is difficult to realize because cloud providers and fax servers are too different in terms of how the services are implemented.
Accordingly, there is a need of a more flexible fax communication technique which overcomes the above-mentioned technical disadvantages and other problems in conjunction with fax messaging.